SOUTH YARMOUTH – The backdoor slider, as its name suggests, is supposed to surprise. It's a pitch that looks like a ball until, at the last moment, it's not.

If a fastball dares hitters to keep up, a backdoor slider wants them to let up. Why reach for a pitch that's no good, anyway?

It was a backdoor slider that Wareham's Tyler Ross (LSU) mashed over the center-field fence at Red Wilson Field on Wednesday. The pitch was low, Ross said afterward, but he hit it anyway, far enough to win a Cape Cod Baseball League championship series opener and bring a boisterous bench pouring out onto the on-deck circle.

The smiling faces knew what few had foreseen: With a win tonight at home against Yarmouth-Dennis, a forgettable regular season would be a footnote to an epic final chapter.

The Gatemen had come out of nowhere again, answering a surprise pitch with a ninth-inning twist of their own in a 6-5 win over the Red Sox. A team some might have once written off as no good is nine innings from being the best.

“He's a battler,” Wareham manager Cooper Farris said of Ross minutes after his team's ninth consecutive win, “and he scraps and claws and digs and just keeps going at it.”

Forget Ross – there might not be a better description of his own team.

The Gatemen earned a No. 2 seed entering the playoffs, but it wasn't because they were great, or even good. They were just better than the rest of the West. Dropped into the Eastern Division, their 21-23 record would've fallen two points shy of No. 4-seeded Chatham.

That's not to say there wasn't optimism in Wareham a week ago, of course. The team charged into the postseason with the league's longest winning streak and, in Tyler Horan (Virginia Tech), maybe the nation's hottest bat.

But after rolling up 27 runs in a two-game sweep of Falmouth, the Gatemen traded high-flying for high-wire. Their series against Bourne started with an eighth-inning rally to win. It ended the next day on a tiebreaking, ninth-inning homer.

Wednesday against Y-D, a team with a reputation for turning pitchers into punch lines, waves of trouble stared down Wareham. The Gatemen didn't blink.

Sure, it would've been easy to. Alex Blandino (Stanford) opened the scoring for the Red Sox with a second-inning double, and after Ethan Gross (Memphis) bungled a throw home, another run came across. The last salvo came from Carlos Asuaje (Southeastern), who walked his way to a bases-loaded RBI and 3-0 Y-D lead.

Wareham, on cue, answered in the top of the third inning with an RBI single from Cole Sturgeon (Louisville). Y-D's Robert Pehl (Washington) held serve with a solo shot to right field before Daniel Palka (Georgia Tech) made it 4-2 with his own one-run blast.

So it remained until the seventh inning, with the offenses ceding center stage to pitchers Kendall Graveman (Mississippi St.) and Andrew Thurman (Cal Irvine). Both impressed in their own ways. Graveman held Y-D to only four runs. Thurman had 12 strikeouts.

“They hit the ball well a couple (of) times, but he didn't back off,” Ross said of Graveman. “He was the same. He battled the whole time he was out there. He got better throughout the game.”

When Thurman left after the seventh, there were cracks beginning to form. Wareham's offense, an irrepressible force in its own right, had halved its two-run deficit after an RBI single by Ross. The next time they were up, the Gatemen loaded the bases and plated Sturgeon on a Palka groundout. Slowly but surely, they'd tied the game.

“It's kind of funny, because Bourne was playing us that way (Tuesday) night,” said Palka, who had two RBIs. “It was kind of the same thing. We felt like if we got ahead, we had the pitching to shut it down.”

After Ross turned that if into a when with a flick of the wrists, Colby Suggs (Arkansas) took care of the rest. Y-D got its tying run only as far as second base before the flamethrower rung up his third strikeout of the inning and the whooping in the Gatemen dugout began.

One surprise was taken care of. Another one – Wareham's first Cape League championship in a decade – might not be too far off.

“These guys haven't quit all year,” Farris said. “Every game we've been in – we've been down seven runs, we've been down four runs – they keep fighting their way back, clawing and digging and getting back in the hunt. They just never quit and that's really good, really fun to watch.”